Stomping all over Tibet

By Claude Arpi

China has dropped all pretences and is now brazenly suppressing the severely restricted rights of Tibetans. This doesn’t augur well.

Chinese propaganda has gone a step further. Beijing now uses its netizens “to urge the Dalai Lama to immolate himself”. The Beijing-sponsored site,China Tibet Online, has several purported postings attributed to Chinese Netizens: “If the Dalai Lama could hire others to set themselves on fire, why doesn’t he burn himself? The Dalai Lama, do you dare to set an example by burning yourself?” Another says, “How disgusting those guys are by asking people to burn themselves! All Chinese netizens suggest the Dalai Lama set himself on fire. Dalai, please burn yourself right away.” Will this atrocious propaganda help dissipate the Tibetans’ resentment against repressive policies? Nobody seems to be asking this question in China.

At the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing, Padma Choling, Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, spoke about the recent spate of self-immolations: “The Chinese Government respects freedom of religion and normal religious activities of the Tibetan people … whoever commits self-immolation is wrong and immoral ... Everyone enjoys the freedom of speech nowadays, and it is not necessary to show extreme and aggressive behaviour.” If this were true, why would young monks and nuns set themselves on fire?

Zhao Qizheng, spokesman for the annual session of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, squarely blamed the Dalai Lama: “According to what I have heard, he (the Dalai Lama) publicly applauded the courage of these people who set fire to themselves.” That is not true. To my knowledge, the Dalai Lama expressed himself only once on the subject. A couple of months ago, he declared in Tokyo: “These incidents of self-immolation are very, very sad. The leadership in Beijing should look into the ultimate cause of these tragic incidents. These Tibetans have faced a tremendously desperate situation, otherwise nobody will commit such drastic acts.”

The China Daily claimed that “Evidence showed that the riots and assaults were planned beforehand and instigated by trained separatists. During a Press conference at the NPC, Wu Zegang, the Deputy Party Chief of Ngaba, tried to defame the victims: “Some of the suicides are committed by clerics returning to lay life, and they all have criminal records ... They have a very bad reputation in society.” According to Wu, the fact that those who had immolated themselves in Ngaba were shouting pro-independence slogans was proof that the movement was “orchestrated and supported by the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence forces”. What the Chinese leaders fail to mention is the oppressive policies are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. They were put in place after the Fifth Tibet Work Forum in February 2010.

Tibet Work Forums are large gatherings called every five or 10 years to discuss the Communist Party of China’s Tibet policies. They are attended by all the members of the powerful Politburo’s Standing Committee, senior People’s Liberation Army Generals, regional leaders, etc. During the last Work Forum, it was decided to send 21,000 Han and Tibetan party officials in teams of four to each of Tibetan Autonomous Region’s 5,453 administrative villages as well as in monasteries.

According to The Tibet Daily, the United Front Department started to promote the ‘Nine Haves Monasteries’ (have a poster of the four national leaders; have a national PRC flag, have a motorable road to the monastery, have a good source of water, have electricity, have a television set, have the capacity to show films, have a reading room for books, have The People’s Daily and The Tibet Dailynewspapers). The party added that all expenses would be met by the TAR Government.

Another scheme, ‘The Six Ones’, was also initiated with slogans such as: “Make one friend. Each temple management official (Read party members) should try to be soul-mates with one or several monks/nuns to understand their difficulties in life and what’s going on in their minds.” Or “Build one file. Establish a file for every monk/nun to document in a detailed fashion their personal and family situation. This will aid in preparedness, understanding and management.” The Nine Haves and the Six Ones are a mixture of good policies with dreadful ones; the objective of this Goebbelsian system is said to ‘develop a mechanism for building harmonious model temples’. But it has had the opposite effect: Tibetans are becoming more and more desperate about these Cultural Revolution-type of policies.

Interestingly, most of the young monks or nuns who today react to the oppressive and repressive system have not witnessed the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the Martial Law in Tibet in 1988/89 or the riots of the early-1990s. Ultimately, the stability of the region will depend on the degree of autonomy that the Tibetans can enjoy. This was promised long ago.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek even spoke of ‘independence of Tibet’ (though it was already independent). In 1945, Chiang stated in the Chinese Parliament that he desired to allow the ‘frontier racial groups’ to attain independence, if capable of doing so. He also affirmed: “I solemnly declare that if the Tibetans should at this time express a wish for self-governance our Government would, in conformity with our sincere traditions, accord it a very high degree of autonomy. If in the future they fulfil economic requirement of independence, the nation’s Government will, as in the case of Outer Mongolia, help them attain this status.”

Since then China’s Central Government has only gone back on its promises. To give another example, Zhu Weiqun, the deputy director of the United Front Work Department, which has been ‘negotiating’ with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002, has recently suggested abolishing special privileges and preferential policies offered to minority nationalities, apart from removing nationality from all identity cards and passports. That would obliterate the uniqueness (guaranteed by the Constitution of China) of ‘minority nationalities’ such as the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Mongols in the name of ‘national cohesion’.

Can India help to ease the situation? Speaking about India’s security, Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic policy for India in the 21st Century written by eminent strategic thinkers, asserts: “Our Tibet policy needs to be reassessed and readjusted ... The Dalai Lama’s popular legitimacy among his own people is a fact that the Chinese Government must acknowledge.”

NOTE-- Claude Arpi is a french author and Tibet expert

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